Tag: ‘vacation’
October 29, 2012 at 7:57 am
Photo by Jon Matthies / by NC-ND 2.0 CC
I never seem to do tourist-y things in my own town until a friend comes to visit. Then they ask, “What should we see? Where should we eat?” And I’m like, “I don’t know! What should we see? Where should we eat?” I have a few ideas, but I’m embarrassed that I can’t recommend more things to do. I may be a local, but I’m not much of a guide.
One of the truisms of my personality is that I tend to gravitate toward home. I like to stay in. I like to order out. I nest. But I also know that most of the good stuff in life exists outside my apartment, so I constantly fight an inner battle to go out and do things instead of stay in and do things. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for over two years now, and while I’ve seen lots of things and eaten at lots of places, I haven’t done as much as I’d like. I need [...]
June 25, 2012 at 7:58 am
I was a big fan of the musical RENT in high school, so the best part of visiting the Lower East Side on Thursday morning was accidentally stumbling upon Avenue B and realizing, “Oh my God! This is where RENT happens! Is the Cat Scratch Club around here too?”
I did not find the Cat Scratch Club, nor did I seriously look for it. I did look for the Clinton St. Bakery because both Carol and Ilene said they’d cut a bitch for their pancakes. Ok, they might not have said it in those exact terms, but I think it was implied. I ate there on March 1st, which means I just barely missed visiting the restaurant during national pancake month. They hadn’t taken down their national pancake month signage yet, so I felt particularly disappointed, like they were rubbing powdered sugar in my wound and drizzling it with chocolate syrup.
The pancakes were delicious, but I did experience a brief moment of terror when I tried to pay with a credit card and they told me [...]
June 22, 2012 at 7:57 am
High Line
Tuesday morning I had to roll out of bed fairly early because the maid was coming. It must be nice to have a maid, but it’s not that nice to wake up early on vacation. Actually, it wasn’t that early, but my sleeping schedule was rather effed up that month, partly because of the medication I was on.
Anyway, I managed to get vertical, get dressed, and get out the door. I took the subway to the West Village area so I could walk the High Line, a raised walkway that used to be a railway. In that sense it reminds me of the Promenade Plantee I visited in Paris, but with less graffiti. It overlooks the Hudson River and in the summer it’s probably prettier than it was at the end of February. I had planned to walk the whole path, but it was an overcast day, chilly, and my feet still hurt from walking to Brooklyn the day before. I was also entering that period of mild depression I blogged about recently. [...]
June 20, 2012 at 7:58 am
Hey, remember when I visited New York last February? No? I barely do either! But I’m finally blogging about it based on all the notes I took. Pen and paper are my second hippocampus.
The Brooklyn Bridge is held together with duct tape. I kid you not. Duct tape. Kentucky chrome. Holding the Brooklyn Bridge together. But we’ll get to that.
When I wasn’t manically coding web sites during my first two days in the city, I was reading a print-out of the comments you guys left on my post asking for recommendations. Thanks for that! I love to plan, plan, plan, my vacations, but I felt like I was cramming the night before a final for this one. I didn’t flesh out my itinerary until I was in the city studying your crib notes. I circled anything that was mentioned more than once, and with some help from Google I made a list of what I wanted to see and where I wanted to eat. I wasn’t sure how many days I would have free [...]
March 22, 2012 at 7:24 am
Getting there is half the challenge
No matter how many times I fly, I always lean toward the window to scope out the city as we land. I’m surprised everyone on the plane doesn’t do this. (Where is your sense of childlike wonder, people? You can’t buy it in Sky Mall.) Despite my superhuman LASIK vision or how far I leaned into the personal space of the occupant of the window seat next me, all I could see was white. Plain, solid, white. I started to wonder if we’d died mid-flight and were now soaring through the afterlife without knowing it. But no! About 20 seconds before we touched down the fog we’d been flying through cleared enough that I could see the ground.
I took a shared van into the city and couldn’t see the skyline at all, which would have been a huge disappointment if this had been my first trip to New York. Fortunately, I was too distracted trying to check into JFK airport on Foursquare to pay much attention anyway. I used [...]
